William Simons charts the misuse of Public Relations by BP and wonders what went wrong.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was seeing the three stooges (Carl Henric Svanberg, Tony Hayward and Bob Dudley) outside BP’s corporate headquarters, looking like junior office workers who have nipped outside for a cheap cigarette, trying to explain why one sacked, persona non grata Chief Executive (Paul Hayward) is going east and another one is hastily being withdrawn from a country where he is as welcome as a turd in a swimming pool to replace the aforementioned Hayward in the west. Another monumental PR disaster from the company, which really knows how to turn a bad situation into a catastrophe. Rule number one in the Simons book of PR – control your environment. Instead of looking like rent boys waiting for tricks, why on earth hadn’t they invited a select TV crew into their boardroom with tasteful corporate logos in the background and answered a pre-agreed set of questions from a sympathetic interviewer?
The BP trail of economic and environmental disaster is by now well known. On the 20th April their Deepwater Horizon rig exploded killing 11 workers. This of course was an unimaginable tragedy for the families and friends of the workers involved, however this didn’t exactly make the front pages. In fact hardly anything was reported until a couple of weeks later when oil began showing up on the gulf’s beaches. Rule number 2 in the good book – be reactive in turning negatives into positives. How different our view of the personality-devoid, monotone Hayward would have been if we had seen him in a hard hat, piloting great environmental clean up vessels, ordering square-jawed oil workers to leap into action. What did we get? Nothing more than a reason to buy “Stupid White Men” and to vote green.
Enter stage left Tony Hayward at the hearing of The U.S. House Energy Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. Some American halfwit with an undersized microdot of senate hearing experience had obviously been advising Tony on how to conduct himself. He obviously didn’t have time to cover the “you are going to look like a twat if you constantly refuse to answer questions” chapter, resulting in one of the most stomach churning hearing performances in modern history and succeeding in nothing more than making the US / UK divide wider. Tony Hayward had single-handedly given news networks more 10-second, gut-wrenching sound bytes from this short hearing than Donald Rumsfeld had amassed in his lifetime.
Next idiot to come to the PR battle line – The Swede (or is he a turnip) Carl-Henric Svanberg, the former CEO of Swedish telecom giant Ericsson. Now Carl-Henric had been given as a special end of sale bonus, two dead bodies to resuscitate – BP’s nose-diving reputation and that of Paul Hayward. Next rule from my PR book, if English ain’t your first language – learn it proper like what I have. Swedes are of course very laid back and have the habit speaking English the way they speak Swedish most notably by emphasising the second syllable of each word. Hence we then have to listen to his semi Oxford English proclaiming “Paaaaaul is dooooooing an exxxxxxxxxcelent joooob”.
The question that springs to my mind is that “are these guys making so much money that they have lost touch with reality?” Certainly in the vanity, sanity, reality rating (turnover, profit, cash in the bank) they are in enviable territory and boy can you have so much fun with their figures. Based on their 2009 figures of revenues of $246 billion and profits of $16 billion, you can work out that globally BP’s cash registers are being filled up to the tune of $7000 every second and that they make a profit of $43 million a day! The shrimp fisherman, café owner and guest house proprietor whose business that these guys have ruined are so far fetched from their reality, that they can not hope to comprehend their suffering or financial loss. How indeed do you even begin to calculate loss? Sure for the fisherman he can say that last year he earned x and this year he earned y, cough up the difference BP. But what about the small businesses not directly effected by the spill? How does a gas station owner, miles from the gulf coast claim that his passing trade has been affected by these morons?
Where does BP go from here? Well replacing one failure with another isn’t going to cut the mustard. At least Bob Dudley in the short time he has been in the position hasn’t let himself be photographed on a luxury racing yacht or been overheard how sorry he feels for himself. The freshman’s business school textbook answer is obviously rebranding of the BP name and there is already some gossip that BP might just do that. The majority of the world is now going to inextricably link BP with their handling of the spill. However in my opinion BP need someone with such a unique quality that most spell-checkers don’t even recognise the word – they need a “do-er” and preferably a human one who can express feelings, give answers and listen. I’m not sure BP’s head-hunters had heard of such a person but most of the gulf coast population would be willing to help in the search.
©William Simons
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